Thirty Years of Agricultural Growth in Brazil: Crop Performance, Regional Profile, and Recent Policy Review

Abstract

The postwar economic growth of Brazil has received much attention in specialized and general literature on development. Structural change associated with rapid and sustained industrialization with strong backward linkages into intermediate capital-goods sectors has been the focus of much of this work. The costs, benefits, and distortions growing out of this secular process of economic growth have been documented, highlighting the unusual performance of the Brazilian economy among the middle-income developing countries.' Finally, the important shift in policy regimes from import substitution in the 1950s to export substitution beginning in the late 1960s has been analyzed, adding a rich base of data and results with which to evaluate the Brazilian performance and test various hypotheses concerning the impact of selected policy parameters on efficiency, growth, and distribution.2 However, until recently, less attention has been devoted to a review of the performance of the agricultural sector within this scenario of rapid change and growth.3 This becomes important in interpreting trends in income distribution in the 1970s. This article is directed toward filling this gap, in part through reviewing the empirical record on the aggregate and regional performances of output, area, and yield of the cropproducing sector of Brazilian agriculture over the 30-year period 195080. This is possible through the extensive time series on crop output (in metric tons), area (in hectares) and physical yields generated by the annual crop-reporting series of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (FIBGE), a series that accounts for 98% of all crop output in Brazil during this period.